There are still people in this world who have no idea that civilization exists.
On remote islands in the Bay of Bengal live mysterious tribes. The five-foot high black skinned Andaman islanders are rumoured by sailors to be cannibals. Their origins are mysterious, but this film reveals how modern DNA analysis suggests that these ancient people have close links to Africa, from where they have been separated for 100,000 years.
The Andamanese people are the various aboriginal inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, a district of India located in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal.
The Andamanese have been classified as Negritos, together with a few other isolated groups in Asia by raciologist theories. They are pygmies, and are the only modern people outside Africa with steatopygia. They have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and appear to have lived in substantial isolation for thousands of years. This degree of isolation is unequaled, except perhaps by the aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania. The Andamanese are believed to be descended from the migrations which, about 60,000 years ago, brought modern humans out of Africa to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.
By the end of the 18th century, when they first came into sustained contact with outsiders, there were an estimated 7,000 Andamanese divided into five major groups. Each group had distinct cultures, separate domains and mutually unintelligible languages. In the next century they were largely wiped out by diseases, violence, and loss of territory. Today, there remain only around 400—450 Andamanese. One group has long been extinct, and only two of the remaining groups still maintain a steadfast independence, refusing most attempts at contact by outsiders.
By the end of the 18th century there were an estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese living on Great Andaman, comprising 10 distinct tribes with distinct languages. The population quickly dwindled, reaching a low of 19 by 1961. It has increased slowly after that, following their move to a reservation on Strait Island. By January 2011, there were only 54 individuals from three tribes, who spoke mostly Hindi.
The Jangil, who originally inhabited Rutland Island, were extinct by 1931; the last individual was sighted in 1907. Only the Sentinelese are still living in their original homeland on North Sentinel Island, largely undisturbed, and have fiercely resisted all attempts at contact.
The Andamanese are classified as Negritos (sometimes also called Proto-Australoids), together with the Semang of Malaysia and the Aeta of the Philippines. Their ancestors are thought to have arrived in the islands 60,000 years ago from coastal India (or crossed over a land bridge from Burma on what is now the Continental shelf of the northern Indian Ocean, during a glacial period. It is assumed that those ancestors were part of the initial Great Coastal Migration that was the first expansion of humanity out of Africa, via the Arabian peninsula, along the coastal regions of the Indian mainland and towards Southeast Asia, Japan and Oceania.
Some anthropologists postulate that Southern India and Southeast Asia was once populated largely by Negritos similar to those of the Andamans, and that some tribal populations in the south of India, such as the Irulas are remnants of that period.
Until the late 18th century, the Andamanese culture, language and genetics were preserved from outside influences by their fierce reaction to visitors, which included killing any shipwrecked foreigners, and by the remoteness of the islands. The various tribes and their mutually unintelligible languages are thus believed to have evolved on their own over millennia.
In 1974, a film crew and anthropologist Trilokinath Pandit attempted friendly contact by leaving a tethered pig, some pots and pans, some fruit and toys on the beach at North Sentinel Island. One of the islanders shot the film director in the thigh with an arrow. The following year, European visitors were repulsed with arrows.
On 2 August 1981, the ship Primrose grounded on the North Sentinel Island reef. A few days later, crewmen on the immobile vessel observed that small black men were carrying spears and arrows and building boats on the beach. The captain of the Primrose radioed for an urgent airdrop of firearms so the crew could defend themselves but did not receive them. On 4 January 1991, Indian scholar Trilokinath Pandit made the first known friendly contact with the Sentinelese.
Until contact, the Andamanese were strict hunter-gatherers. They did not practice cultivation, and lived off hunting indigenous pigs, fishing, and gathering. Their only weapons were the bow, adzes and wooden harpoons. Besides the aboriginal people of Tasmania, the Andamanese were the only people who in the 19th century knew no method of making fire. They instead carefully preserved embers in hollowed-out trees from fires caused by lightning strikes. They are known as Chadda
